Steven Chu Named Sixth
Berkeley Lab Director
On Thursday, June 17, 2004, the Regents of the University of California
named Steven Chu the new Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Since 1987, Chu has been a professor of physics at Stanford University.
For the previous nine years he was at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey;
there he did the research that led to his 1997 Nobel Prize in physics,
which he shared with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips, for
methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.
Chu received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley
in 1976 and was a post-doctoral fellow there until 1978. He got his B.S.
in 1970 from the University of Rochester. He graduated from Garden City
High School in Garden City, New York, as a self-described "A-minus
student — and by my family's standards, this was appalling."
However he still remembers the gifted high-school physics teacher who
encouraged experimentation and "ambitious laboratory experiments,"
including a pendulum Chu built in order to measure the force of gravity
"with precision." Chu's choice of experimental design was influenced
by his childhood passion for Erector Sets. "An understanding mother
allowed me to keep the projects going for days on end," he says.
He notes, ironically, that 25 years after his high school measurement
of gravity he did a refined version of the same measurement "using
laser-cooled atoms in an atomic fountain interferometer."
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Conversation with Steven Chu
